The River House

by Margaret Leroy

  There were things I could have told her, that I wanted so much to tell her—the things I’d been thinking, lying amid the dandelions, trying to understand. How I’d chosen Greg because he seemed so different from our father, but now I was starting to worry that the peace he’d seemed to promise was really a kind of absence—that it wasn’t something you could build a marriage on. How sometimes I wondered if half the things I’d done had been a struggle to prove that there’s some good in me. How even now I felt such shame because I let Mum down.

  But I couldn’t say these things to Ursula, who was frowning as she sat at my table, looking as though she wanted to be anywhere but there.

  “You mustn’t brood,” she said. “Really, Ginnie, you mustn’t. It’s bad for the baby.”

  CHAPTER 14

  IT’S A DULL DAY BY THE RIVER—soft, warm for November. We go to the place at the side of the path, the secret place where the branches hang low. More leaves have fallen since last we came here; we have to go farther in to be hidden from view. We make love quickly, keeping on most of our clothes.

  “D’you have to go straight back now?” I say as I brush the leaves and twigs from his shoulders.

  He looks at his watch.

  “More or less. Well, I don’t have time for a drink, anyway.”

  “Perhaps a few moments?”

  “OK. A few moments,” he says.

  There’s a place where I turn off the path, taking him through the scrub between the path and the river. Over the water on Eel Pie Island, the trees are turning gold. The grass here is worn where people have walked, and stone steps lead down to the water.

  “There’s a beach here,” I say. “When the tide’s right out.”

  Years ago I often brought the girls here. We discovered the beach one lazy summer afternoon—a little crescent of bronze sand littered with black fronds of seaweed, ragged and shiny and plastic-looking, the sand all lightly imprinted by the feet of many birds. But today the tide is coming in; the sand is swallowed up already. We sit on the steps, our feet on the lowest step not covered by the tide. The stone has a pale crust of dry mud. He puts his arm around my waist, pushing his hand between my clothes and my skin. There’s a cold smell from the river.

  “Talk to me,” he says. “Tell me what you think about when we make love. Tell me what you like.”

  I’m hesitant. I think of his taste, of his warm slide into me, of everything in me opening up to him. But I’ve never had this kind of conversation.

  “I don’t know if I can say those things,” I tell him. “Women are different.” I’m playing for time, taking refuge in generalization. “Women are better at saying what they don’t like.”

  “I’d noticed,” he says, a little rueful and weary, making me smile.

  “I could tell you the things I don’t like. … Anything to do with food—eating strawberries off each other, all that kind of thing. And cross-dressing. I mean, why would anyone choose to dress as a woman if they don’t have to?”

  “You don’t like being a woman?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You do it well,” he says.

  “I’ve had practice.”

  “But surely it’s much less boring, isn’t it, being a woman? I like women. Women are more interesting.”

  I smile. Eva would say, A man who likes women a lot has liked a lot of women.

  “Group sex, too,” I tell him. “I’ve never understood it. I don’t see how sex can be communal. Wouldn’t it lose its charge?”

  “So what do you like, Ginnie?” he says.

  The tide is rushing in, water clear as air covering the lowest branches of the rosebay willow herb that clings to the banks of the river. I love the way the plant moves under the water—its dance, its sinuousness, the way it seems to be stirred by a secret wind.

  “Your mouth. Your hands, the things you do with your hands, the way you move them. The sound of your breathing.”

  He has his mouth in my hair.

  “OK,” he says. “Your turn. Ask away.”

  “Things you like then.”

  “Oh, all of it really. You know how men are.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I like to watch you come,” he says.

  I curve into him. I want to make love again.

  A houseboat goes by, green-painted with a pattern of roses and a dog stretched out on top. It’s all so contradictory here by the river—behind us the path and the shadowy hidden places, and in front this watery thoroughfare where everything can be seen.

  There are other things I could ask, because they fill me with a feverish curiosity. How old is your wife—is she very much younger than me? And is she very beautiful, as beautiful as her photograph? How often do you make love with her? Have you had affairs before? How long did they last? And who did you have them with, and exactly how much did you love them? But I don’t ask these questions.

  A heron takes off from somewhere near, the sound of its wings like someone tearing linen, its plumage the color of smoke or winter sky. It lands in the willow with branches that fall into the water at the end of Eel Pie Island. We are quiet for a while, watching.

  “When I first came here with Molly and Amber,” I tell him, “we found some mussel shells and an abandoned sandal, and someone had written their name with a stick in the sand.” I think how the waves came rushing up in the wake of the pleasure boats, making the girls shriek with delight and run for the safety of the steps, and with the turbulence came that wonderful brackish smell, the mixture of fresh and salt, the promise of the sea. “And once we came in the evening, and the water was pink and all these geese and swans were just standing in the shallows.”

  “I’d like to hear more about your girls,” he says.

  I tell him some of Molly’s university stories.

  Two swans come over and linger near us, casually dabbling, their long necks sinuous as snakes, but mud-colored, not immaculate like their backs or wings. They’re so close you can hear their grunting, and the soft shushing sounds their beaks make as they preen their feathers.

  “You never talk about Jake,” I say.

  He slips his hand out from under my sweater; he still has his arm around me, but he isn’t touching my skin.

  “Jake’s not like other kids,” he says. His voice is tired, heavy.

  I think of the photograph, the unsmiling little boy.

  “Megan always thought there was something wrong,” he says slowly. “She thought it for months, she kept on about it. I told her not to worry.”

  I wait quietly. I remember the shadow I’ve seen on him, and the way he looks so sad when he thinks that no one can see.

  “I feel dreadful about that now,” he says. “I should have listened.”

  For a while he doesn’t say anything. I bite back the urge to ask more.

  “They say it’s Asperger’s,” he says then. “Like a mild form of autism. He can’t read people. … Sorry, I’m being really crass—you’d know about these things.”

  “Yes. But not from inside, like you do.”

  “Everything’s very literal,” he says. “He doesn’t get the social rules. Stuff like—if someone says, ‘How are you?’ they don’t really want you to tell them. And nobody likes him, of course. He says the wrong thing and upsets people.”

  We’re sitting separately now. I’m very aware of the space between us, the way we have edged a little farther apart.

  “Yes,” I say. I’d like to hold him and comfort him, but I feel I don’t have the right.

  “I just see him getting everything wrong. It breaks your heart,” he says.

  We’re silent for a moment, looking out over the water.

  “Will you have another child?” I say then.

  He shrugs.

  “I don’t know. Not the way we’re going.”

  He isn’t looking at me now.

  “I have this dream,” he says, “of seeing him kicking a football round the garden with his mates. Except he doesn’t have mates.
”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  We sit there in the cold, with the sounds of the swans and the tide coming in. Soon the water will reach us.

  “Ginnie.” There’s a new sound in his voice, urgent, definite. “I don’t want to change or disrupt anything. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  He turns to me, he has my face in his hands. His hands smell of our lovemaking.

  “Ginnie. Can we do this without anyone getting hurt?”

  “If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be here,” I say: then think, Is that true? Wouldn’t I still be here no matter how risky it was? Could I stop myself? My mind shies away from the thought.

  He lowers his hands, shakes his head a little.

  “There are all these people, all these children,” he says.

  “I think … I make it all right with myself,” I tell him, “by imagining this is another world, a separate world. That when I’m with you, I’ve entered a different world—and what happens in one world doesn’t change anything in the other. That what I do here can’t harm them there. …”

  The water has reached our feet now. We get up and turn to go. I realize that I’m shivering.

  “We just have to be very careful,” I say. “As long as we’re careful, everyone will be safe. Won’t they?”

  There’s such a sense of loss when he leaves me, when I drop him off on Sheffield Street and he walks away. As I move through the week, I tell myself, With every step I take, I am walking toward the next time.

  CHAPTER 15

  I HAVE ANOTHER SESSION with Kyle McConville. He kneels on the floor by the Lego box. He’s turned away from me. He builds the room again, the high walls made of Lego, no doors or windows in the room, the adult and the boy.

  His face is white as chalk. He still seems very afraid. I think of what Will told me.

  “The little boy’s safe in the room,” I say. “The walls are keeping him safe. Nobody’s going to harm him.”

  He goes on building. His movements seem less abrupt today, his hands moving more fluidly as he snaps the bricks into position.

  I choose some window pieces from the box of Lego. I spread them out beside him on the floor.

  “Perhaps the boy would like a window in his room,” I say. “He might like one of these windows. It could go in quite high up. Just a little window.”

  He looks at the window pieces for a long, slow moment. I sit there quietly, not looking directly at him. There’s silence all around us: You can hear the rooks in the elms, and Kyle’s rapid, shaky breath. His forehead creases as he frowns. Then he puts out his hand and picks up one of the window pieces. He slots it into his wall.

  “Now the boy’s got a window,” I say. “He can see out a bit if he wants to. He’s still quite safe in his room.”

  He goes on building. He builds the walls very tall, and he puts on a roof with a chimney. When he’s finished, he sits back on his heels and looks at his work for a moment.

  When he goes he gives me a small, crooked smile. I know that we’re moving forward. One day soon he’ll put a door in the wall: and he’ll go through the door and face the thing he’s afraid of.

  Amber has her braces removed.

  I’m in the kitchen when she comes back from the orthodontist’s appointment. I hear her fling down her bicycle, and her rapid step in the passageway. I can tell she’s happy.

  She makes an entrance, pushing the door wide, tugging off her helmet so all her hair swings out.

  “Well?” she says, and smiles with parted lips.

  It’s startling. She isn’t a girl anymore. She has a wide, even, immaculate smile.

  “Wow.” I hug her. “You look beautiful.”

  There’s a bag of toffees she’s bought in celebration—forbidden for two years in case they stuck to her braces. She dumps them on the table: She’s eaten half the bag already.

  “I’ve got this retainer, it really hurts.” She thrusts a pink box at me. “But nobody wears them anyway.”

  “That’s up to you,” I say.

  “Are you sure they’re OK?” she says. “Are you really, really sure they’re completely even? That there isn’t a tiny gap?”

  “I’m sure. It’s just the most perfect smile,” I say.

  She turns to look at herself in the mirror that’s shaped like a crescent moon. The mirror is high—she has to stand on tiptoe. She has her head to one side, then the other; she’s posing, holding her head at different angles, like a photographer’s model. She’s thin and her hair is heavy and full where she crimped it last night for a party; she seems top-heavy, like a flower, her head a bright, lavish blossom on the slenderest stalk.

  “Yes,” she says. It’s a statement of how things are. She gives a little laugh of pleasure.

  She’s about to go upstairs. I look at her, her skinny jeans and her long red hair and that smile. I clear my throat.

  “Amber—there’s something I’ve wanted to say. If you and this boy you’re seeing—you know … I mean, if you’re serious …”

  She fixes me with a clear stare. Her eyes are a washed blue, like sky after rain.

  “What is this, Mum? Are you trying to say, am I on the Pill?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Mum, for God’s sake, what do you think? Of course I am.”

  “But you haven’t been to the doctor.”

  She shrugs. “We all get our stuff from Oasis,” she says.

  It’s a clinic where some of the girls I work with go. I picture her sitting in reception next to Caron Clarkson, whose arms are tattooed with dragons, who has sex in car parks for very small sums of money.

  “Is that, well, OK?”

  “It’s what everyone does, Mum. I’d thought you’d have known.”

  “Well, good,” I say. “As long as you keep yourself safe. As long as you know what you’re doing.”

  I start to fill the dishwasher. I think of all the books I read when Molly and Amber were younger—books on raising girls with boundless self-esteem and inspiring joyous sexual self-awareness and empowering our daughters to feel at ease in their bodies. This isn’t the conversation I’d imagined having.

  “Lauren knows some people who have sex in Saint Dunstan’s churchyard,” she says. She’s a little self-righteous, as though to say that she’d have nothing to do with such excesses. “I think that’s gross. People should get a room.”

  “Amber, if you ever want to bring anyone back here …”

  “Thanks, Mum, but we’re OK.”

  She unwraps a toffee and stuffs it in her mouth. It makes her cheek bulge. She looks like a little girl again.

  “Mum, I just can’t believe you’d think I’d be that stupid. You know, not to use anything.”

  “You wouldn’t rather go to our doctor?”

  “Mum, I’m fine, OK? How often do I have to tell you, exactly?”

  She goes up to her room, leaving the box with the retainer but taking the toffees.

  On Saturday, Eva throws a party—a joint birthday party for her husband, Ted, who is fifty, and the twins, who are sixteen. It’s at the rowing club.

  It’s a squat concrete building, unimposing from outside, but on the first floor there’s a bar and a dance floor and a balcony with a wide view of the Thames. The place is already full when we get there. There’s a band, playing eighties hits with great enthusiasm. We drink, and talk to Ted and Eva’s friends. There’s a thread of sadness woven through these conversations. Someone’s father has Alzheimer’s and can’t remember his wife’s name, though he can still play the piano; someone’s daughter has Down’s, and she leaves school in the summer, and what will happen to her then? I think that we are fortunate, Greg and I.

  The more extroverted of Eva’s friends are already on the dance floor, remembering the moves they used to make, bouncing around with an air of unselfconscious enjoyment, the febrile gorgeousness of disco lights playing across their faces and clothes. I’d like to ask Greg to dance, but I kno
w what he would say. The teenagers—Lauren and Josh’s friends, Amber among them—lurk like beautiful moths on the periphery of things. The girls are dressed like Amber, in clingy jeans and vest tops, all bones and gleaming golden skin and expectation. I recognize some of them—Jamila, Sofia, Katrine—it’s a loose friendship group that Amber is part of. In winter they meet at parties; on summer evenings they like to gather in Stoneleigh Gardens, behind the gasworks, where they gossip and drink from cans and text their friends. Their parents perhaps have brought them tonight, but they don’t really want to be here yet. They stand with their backs to the dance floor, keen to convey that whatever is happening there is no concern of theirs. Occasionally one of them will weave her way to the bar across the floor between the dancers—shoulders hunched, eyes down, rapid and unsmiling, like someone venturing into enemy territory. Later the parents will go, and their party will begin.

  When it gets too hot in the bar, we go out onto the balcony. You can smell the cold smell of the river. Everything is black—the sky, the water, the trees on the opposite bank—except where light from the rowing club catches the water just below the balcony, spilling from the tops of the waves the way shine spills from silk. Across the water a single white-painted house glimmers pale. Our music must be loud to them, carrying over the river with unimpeded clarity. There’s a scattering of stars and a slice-of-melon moon. You can’t see people’s faces out here, only the lights from inside that play across them, the careless dancing colors in their glasses of wine and their eyes. After the heat in the bar, the cold, silk touch of the river air is wonderful on my skin. We drink silently for a moment, resting our arms on the balustrade. I glance at Greg. His face is blotted out by shadow. I have a sudden giddy sense that I have no connection to him: that he could be anyone. If I said his name, would he turn to me? Once I saw a TV program about how people cope with urban living: how for each of us there is a group of familiar strangers—those people we recognize but never greet. Sometimes Greg seems like that to me—someone I don’t really know, just someone who’s waiting on the same rail platform. I look out over the water, feeling the dizziness that’s induced by its scarcely perceptible movement, just caught on the edges of vision—as though where you’re standing is not as secure as you thought.